Search

Indigenous knowledge of place is not well‐served by today's digital geospatial technologies, such as spatial data, maps, spatial databases, and GIS. This paper aims to identify and explore new connections between Indigenous knowledge of place and digital geospatial technologies. Our analysis is structured around three key gaps in past work: (a) the overrepresentation of digital data about space, rather than knowledge of place; (b) a lack of facility to differentiate access to knowledge and enable Indigenous data sovereignty; (c) a lack of facility to support and sustain relationships between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous peoples. The paper further identifies and explores recent research topics in the field of geographic information science (GI science) with relevance to addressing these gaps. This includes identifying new serendipitous synergies with previously unconnected research areas, such as research into location privacy, uncertainty, qualitative spatial reasoning, or distributed spatial computing. The conclusions acknowledge that our retrospective approach is unlikely to lead to radical reformulation of geospatial technologies. Nevertheless, we argue that identifying technological opportunities could offer a pragmatic pathway to more rapidly bootstrap new approaches, beyond simply technological "fixes." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Benjamin's exuberance for weaving haunting sonic textures into his renowned style of snappy passages and his own sense of writerly intentionality, this paper describes an ongoing research project concerned with the collection of sound bytes using a sound archive and interface (sonification). The archive records my recollections of an earlier life reimagined as 'Scenes' from a Childhood, Village Life and Songs of Resistance. The recollections, rendered in Scene I, materialise as a textual street-sketch using a manually-generated word cloud with childlike doodles to disrupt the oneiric rhetoric of national boundaries and régimes of memory. The work blends creative writing (Scene II) with digital art (Scene III) and reflects my fascination with the built and the natural, home and host, the ear as 'prompt' for and 'prop' in practices of the imagination. The larger cartography of linked digital designs acts as a literary device (ekphrasis), an organising tool that accents the possibilities and impossibilities of listening techniques, while connecting me to the collective voices of what Deleuze and Guattari call a minor literature. The sound archive contains noise that is simultaneously recognisable and alien. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arcades Project evokes a dreamy vision of the seduction of Paris in the 1930s as the city is transformed into a world of decadence, depravity and escape. Benjamin's writing takes us to the Oneiropolis, a social ecosystem saturated by the déluge of a 'dreamy tide of bad taste' bathing citizens and tourists in the narcotic waters of spectacle. Even today, as we read Benjamin's disjointed yet baroque reflections on this Paris, we are pushed benevolently into a labyrinth populated by familiar characters, like the flâneurs, gamblers, collectors, feuilletonists, prostitutes, fashion creatures and fellow dreamers, all of whom energise an ever-present mood of foreboding, waste and collapse with loaded tropological questions about life, modernism and modernity. 'What was gathering there?' 'Where was the light coming from?' Indeed, what would the darkness illuminate? For light and darkness themselves have entered a chiasmus only poetically to exchange properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This vignette about experimental participatory art is part of an intellectual foray that crisscrossed Melbourne and Manhattan. As a refusal to form, the intent was to pose more questions than to provide answers on the process of collecting for an archive. The project draws from a site-specific work, and should be read as an ode to Walter Benjamin, providing a poetic description of collecting as method, walking and philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses some critical issues in the research environment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander candidates at Australian universities. It will be useful to non-Indigenous supervisors of Indigenous students, as well as Indigenous students considering the different kinds of creative practice projects possible at postgraduate level. The article examines the nexus between Indigenous knowledge and creative practice research. The significance of this relationship becomes more apparent with increasing participation of Indigenous creative practitioners in postgraduate education. By drawing on our experience as supervisors of PhD- and MA-level higher degrees with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander candidates, we discuss some of the issues that may arise for supervisors and Indigenous researchers in creative practice research environments. Through Indigenous candidates’ creative projects, we argue these works provide insights into the existing conventions of practice, knowledge and research in Western education. Thus, we demonstrate how Indigenous knowledge has contributed to creative practice research, and broadened its horizons and methods of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Traditionally marginalized groups now have more access to new and unconventional means to participate in politics, transforming the media ecologies of existing political environments. Contemporary feminist scholarship has centered on how women use new media technologies to serve political agendas. However, this literature focuses predominately on women in the West, while women in developing countries, or Asia more generally, have been largely excluded from analysis. This article aims to fill this gap by examining Thai women's online activities during the 2013/2014 Bangkok political protests. Specifically, we ask how the rise of social and digital media has altered what it means to participate politically in the context of Thai women's present-day political experience. To answer this question we looked at how women resorted to various digital and social media to discuss women's rights and political issues, including Yingluck Shinawatra's political leadership as Thailand's first female prime minister (2011-2014). Moving beyond traditional notions of participation, we argue that there is a need to recognize the emerging dynamics of women's online engagement in the political landscape of Thailand. In the context of a totalitarian state, speaking out against the ruling authority online embodies an additional layer of citizen resistance, a feature of digital life that is often taken for granted in Western democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about resettled Afghan Hazaras in Australia, many of whom are currently undergoing a complex process of transition (from transience into a more stable position) for the first time in their lives. Despite their permanent residency status, we show how resettlement can be a challenging transitional experience. For these new migrants, we argue that developing a sense of belonging during the transition period is a critical rite of passage in the context of their political and cultural identity. A study of forced migrants such as these, moving out of one transient experience into another transitional period (albeit one that holds greater promise and permanence) poses a unique intellectual challenge. New understandings about the ongoing, unpredictable consequences of 'transience' for refugee communities is crucial as we discover what might be necessary, as social support structures, to facilitate the process of transition into a distinctly new environment. The article is based on a doctoral ethnographic study of 30 resettled Afghan Hazara living in the region of Dandenong in Melbourne, Australia. Here, we include four of these participants' reflections of transition during different phases of their resettlement. These reflections were particularly revealing of the ways in which some migrants deal with change and acquire a sense of belonging to the community. Taking a historical view, and drawing on Bourdieu's notion of symbolic social capital to highlight themes in individual experiences of belonging, we show how some new migrants adjust and learn to 'embody' their place in the new country. Symbolic social capital illuminates how people access and use resources such as social networks as tools of empowerment, reflecting how Hazara post-arrival experiences are tied to complex power relations in their everyday social interactions and in their life trajectories as people in transition. We learned that such tools can facilitate the formation of Hazara migrant identities and are closely tied to their civic community participation, English language development, and orientation in, as well as comprehension of local cultural knowledge and place. This kind of theorization allows refugee, post-refugee and recent migrant narratives to be viewed not merely as static expressions of loss, trauma or damage, but rather as individual experiences of survival, adaptation and upward mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some stories are hard to swallow. They contain material that is taboo and some would say the taboo is forbidden territory. Most of us want stories that are neatly packaged complete with the fairy tale happy ending. Most of us want stories that make us laugh and coat us with a good dose of feel good fuzziness. Not many of us want another ‘misery memoir’. So what if the subject matter is ‘difficult’ or disturbs uneasy memories? What happens when the story involves suicide, murder, crime, war, death, incest or rape? What if these were part of our family stories? And as writers, what do we ‘do’ with these difficult memories? While we might deceive ourselves by remembering ‘only the good times’, memories attached to taboo issues are often the hardest to write about. This paper reflects on some of these challenges and how we consider them in the light of our own family stories. We explore the tensions between fact and fiction in story telling, and the role that memory, imagination and reflection play in broaching taboo issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines literature by Asian writers living in Australia. I focus on contemporary Asian Australian writing and how it has been marketed and reviewed. My aim is to present two major issues working against both its reception by Australian and international readers and the ways of thinking about representations of 'Asia' in general. The first issue relates to the publishing industry's tendency to box Asian Australian literature under the rubric of 'migrant' and 'ethnic' writing. The second issue concerns stereotypes perpetuated about Asian people and culture in both populist media representations and some of the historical literature. Despite a writer's connections to and/or reflections about specific places in Asia or elsewhere in their writing, Asian Australian literature does not necessarily have to be confined to territory, migration or the ethnicity of the writer in its marketing. The stories contained within this literature can travel across geographic distances and be universal. Universal stories tend to transcend race, class, gender and geographic boundaries, convey a complex of meanings and possess deeper truths that resonate with the general community. This article shows how Asian Australian literature can bring restrictive representations of Asian people and culture into critical play. It suggests that contemporary Asian Australian writing or Asian-themed literature is complex and changing, reflecting the transformations taking place in Asia itself, in the relationship between Australia and Asia, and the ongoing engagements between Asian writers in Australia with Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience on his travel to Borneo and to Bendigo, Victoria with her mother.

Aboriginal historiographies challenge conventional interpreting of societies and cultures' histories which are often linear, singular, and excluding of other than dominant narratives. But alternative solutions to conventional history are often binarized as minority or oppositional groups and simply "accommodated" in what continues as the dominant story. The work of Japanese scholar Minoru Hokari from his time with Gurindji people, an Aboriginal Australian group from the Kalkaringi region in northern Australia, is discussed here as an innovative way of re-framing how we think outside such dichotomies. Following Hokari's lead the author's own cross-culture positioning is then used to explore Aboriginal construction of knowledge and history amongst the Ganai/Kurnai, the Aboriginal people originating from the region of Gippsland in southern Australia. This broadens the argument for valuing multiple alternative histories that such lived experience offers for majority and Indigenous peoples alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrative analysis has emerged as a central analytical force in furthering a critique of colonial discourse. This article examines the relationship between narrative and discourse, by offering a comparative analysis of indigenous narrative, in the context of Australian and Malaysian history and contemporary museum practices of representation. I argue that indigenous knowledge is underpinned by narratives that enable a radical reconceptualization of existing epistemological and philosophical practices to viewing the world. This knowledge reflects various narratives of resistance about indigeneity that challenge traditional understandings of difference, revealing the ways indigenous people make sense of the past and construct their own narratives. My intention is to explore the tensions of place, space and memory through a reflection on indigenous resistance narratives. I examine different knowledges of place and “country”, suggesting there are parallels between indigenous people’s cultural knowledge in Australia and indigenous people’s knowledge in Malaysia. Western preoccupations continue to ignore this cultural knowledge and, in doing so, they eclipse broader awareness about issues of significance for indigenous communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the state of social relations in Australia within the context of the Aboriginal people and her own childhood as an Malaysian immigrant in Brisbane, Australia. The author's first playmates were Aboriginal children with whom she felt a mutual bond because they were, like her, outside of mainstream Australian society. The author reviews literature on the Aboriginal culture, and cites authors including Minoru Hokari, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Joseph Pugliese, and Franz Fanon.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue including transient migrants, social media and identities and social networks.